Victim in Recovery: Roseann Sdoia

Family members describe Roseann Sdoia as an “infectious” and gregarious personality with many friends.

Washington Post

04/25/2013

By Annie Gowen

Roseann Sdoia, an avid runner and devotee of Boston’s sports teams, has an annual spring tradition, her mother said.

Every year on Marathon Monday, she goes to the early Red Sox game and then heads directly to the marathon finish line on Boylston Street, staying after to “party” with friends. This year, she was standing on Boylston Street when the second bomb went off nearby.

Sdoia ended up losing her right leg and almost her left in the blast, said her mother, Rosemarie Buckley of Dracut, Mass. Among Sdoia’s first worries when she woke up in the hospital later was what had happened to the friends who had been with her. She was worried they had been killed; in fact, they survived.

“She’s remarkable,” Buckley said.

Sdoia grew up in the small community of Dracut, about 30 miles of north of Boston. She attended a local Catholic high school, Academy of Notre Dame in Tyngsboro, and later graduated with a business degree from the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. At the time of her injury, she was living in Boston and working as a residential property manager at a New England real estate development firm.

Family members describe Sdoia — who adamantly does not want her age to be released, according to her mother — as an “infectious” and gregarious personality with many friends. She also loved running and had completed a five-kilometer race the day before the marathon, according to her cousin, Mark Buckley of Boulder, Colo.

“She’s very much a sort of larger-than-life person,” Buckley said. “She has more friends than people I know in the world.”